Composite materials have been used increasingly in a variety of industries, including the automotive, marine and aerospace industries. In some instances, composite parts can be formed using automated composite material application machines, such as composite tape lamination machines or composite fiber placement machines.
Some existing composite material application machines, for example, a flat tape lamination machine (FTLM) or a contoured tape lamination machine (CTLM), can be capable of producing flat or gently contoured composite parts by laying relatively wide strips of composite tape onto generally horizontal or vertical tooling surfaces, such as a mandrel. In addition, some tape lamination machines can be capable of laying relatively narrow strips, or “tows,” of composite tape onto a more complex contoured surface, including generally cylindrical or spherical surfaces.
In order to more efficiently produce relatively large composite parts, including aircraft fuselage sections, a high-rate, multihead, composite material application machine has been conceived. As conceived, the multihead composite material application machine should be capable of manufacturing a wide variety of composite parts, such as flat spars, stringer charges, wing skins and fuselage barrel sections, as well as composite parts in other industries, such as the automotive, marine, industrial vehicle and prefabricated architectural structure industries.
However, existing composite part programming systems do not have the capacity to efficiently define tape courses for a relatively complex surface to program a composite material application machine with multiple composite material application heads to form a variety of composite parts. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a method and apparatus that can efficiently generate tape course definitions for a relatively complex surface for use in producing a composite part program for a high-rate composite material application machine with multiple composite material application heads to form a variety of composite parts without requiring excessive manual programming.